Michael Jackman of the Metro Times reports on a brewing art controversy in Hamtramck. One of the artists he mentions is Jason Williams, aka Revok.
Williams is a well known Los Angeles artist who has run into considerable trouble with law enforcement. He's sort of hiding out in Detroit, doing art, and talking to LA Weekly.
Here is an excerpt of what he had to say about Detroit:
"I couldn't afford to make the kind of work I wanted to make in L.A., and I needed to go somewhere cheap where I could get away from being haunted by the police force," Williams explains by phone. "Detroit is wide open. There's tons of space — you can do anything you want here. I've been in L.A. a really long time, and it's really easy to get distracted and caught up. So I flew out here in February — it was freezing. I got off the plane and started driving around, sliding all over the ice in the streets and fell in love with it instantly. This place is fucking awesome."
Detroit's economic situation and the wealth of abandoned property it has generated is another reason fate placed Williams there. "It can be a sad place," he says. "It's a beautiful place in an unconventional way, a big graveyard of all these industries and people technology left behind. A lot of pieces that I use to construct this new work are from homes people lived in, or maybe windows from an abandoned business. Other people's stories left as trash or rubble. Now, filtered through my own life experience, I've hopefully made something new and positive."
